[zacherates]

1228 pesos in 1976 was worth about $4.50 in 1976 USD [1].

... and if he'd bought into the S&P 500 (Vanguard launched the First Index Investment Trust now the Vanguard 500 Index Fund in 1976 [2]), it would be worth about about $190 in today's USD. Which you could sell to buy about 2.99g of gold today (3 trillion times as much as reported).

While obvious you'd have to be extremely prescient to put your money in a completely different type of fund that had launched only just that year and at the time they would not have touched such small dollar investments.

... but today we now know that Bogle's idea was actually pretty good and you really can make such small dollar investments (eg. Fidelity's no-fee, large cap fund has no minimum to invest (FNILX), or you could buy a fractional share of a variety of large cap ETFs: SPY (SPDR), IVV (iShares), or VOO (Vanguard) from a variety of brokerages). Of course, a minor wouldn't be able to own shared directly... so, get your kids a UTMA account [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_exchange_rates_of_A... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanguard_Group#Growth_of_c... [3] https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/summary/31591... [4] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/utma.asp

[mattm]

For comparison if he bought gold directly - $4.50 would have bought about 1.13g of gold

[1] https://sdbullion.com/gold-prices-1976

[manarth]

Which today would get you around US$72

[ZoomZoomZoom]

And how could he have done it, being in Argentina in 1976? Not even asking about Vanguard. Just accessing s&p500 or NASDAQ is not easy even today, don't think it was much easier then.

[zacherates]

If the thesis of the thread was "Gee, it sure sucked to grow up in Argentina in the 70s with no access to high-quality financial products." that would be extremely relevant... but the thesis is much more expansive than that ("Prepare for a fantastic lesson about the power of inflation." / "Takeaway: may the sign of the exponential be ever in your favor. Positive, you own the world. Negative, you get diluted into nanoparticles.").

The folks getting spooked about inflation right now and reading this thread (it is written in English after all), almost certainly can invest even very small amounts in high quality investment products. There's no need to get fatalistic about saving ("you get diluted into nanoparticles."), it has never been easier for normal people to put their money to work productively.

[ZoomZoomZoom]

> The folks [...] reading this thread almost certainly can invest even very small amounts in high quality investment products.

...and then the stock market gets stopped for a couple of weeks and exchange rate of international currencies becomes practically state-controlled.

> There's no need to get fatalistic about saving

There absolutely is a need, when the life just doesn't work like people here are pretending it does.

It's all just an extremely US-centric view, people there are just lucky to live in a fantastically economically stable environment, but this leads to them being unprepared to potential economic shocks, including not enough support for the discussions of ways to evade the consequences for regular citizens.